An open letter to the algorithm gnomes

The Facebook algorithm has decided I want wall-to-wall Molly Crabapple complaining about bad reviews she’s gotten from pro-Israel reviewers, which she posts and receives adulation from fans who believe these reviews demonstrate how right she is. It’s so random. I have not read her book, I have no plans to. I’m aware of who she is, I’m not saying I’m the furthest from Molly Crabapple neo-Bundism discourse of all people on the planet, but also, I don’t really care either way, I am not her biggest fan nor her most energetic detractor. It’s a wide world and other fish to fry and whichever other clichés, but it’s just odd. It’s so persistent. It’s like, you MUST care about this lady. How she was done wrong by the reviewers. Don’t they (the algorithm gnomes) know that authors only want to know when they were done wrong by reviewers, and when this proves how right they were? The heck do they imagine I care if it is happening to she whose home is where she lives now?

The Instagram algorithm, meanwhile, will not rest until it has sold me anti-chafe bike shorts. Constant flow of these, some flesh-colored, some athleisure-colored, none of any interest to me, a woman who has worn the same pair of loose lilac linen shorts for most of the summer, and who, not to get too personal here, is not in urgent search of a fix for this specific issue. Like I’m sure I could set forth conditions where it would happen, I am not built such that this is outright impossible, I’m not entirely sure what is or isn’t thigh gap apart from that I don’t have it, but also, I must not be especially prone to crisis-level chafing, as I can take a walk in a dress and not think, I need emergency nude-colored bike shorts. If it were much hotter out, the walk much longer, I… would be that much less interested in an additional warm layer under my clothing. I’m having trouble picturing risk of chafing outweighing risk of sweating, which itself seems like it would cause more skin irritation. I don’t want these shorts! But the algorithm doesn’t believe me. Which seems a bit silly because there are any number of things I could be prompted to want to buy, but they’ve put all their eggs in the body-positive shapewear basket.

And this’un, as I think we’ve established, wants me to know what women whose bio reads ‘Catholic homeschooling homesteading mom of six’ think of my parenting, of my general approach to life. I’ll give them this: they’re more interesting than Molly Crabapple’s plaintive tour of self-promotion or beige thigh-wrap. The problem is that I am not one who is threatened by the tradwife, nor who finds her compelling. I’m too 21st century lady-Woody-Allen to be moved by any of this, is the thing. I’m not worried about being mistaken for a tradwife if I wear ankle-length florals, nor brimming with self-loathing over the fact that I get around by streetcar versus horse-and-buggy. I am a mother of two who wanted to be a mother of two, offering fodder neither for child-regret pieces at The Cut nor for the corners of the internet where deep down every woman—if she even is a woman—wishes she had a dozen. But I bike-camp-blogged, so this is now my lot.